A world expert in space weather wants to bring waves crashing down onto Bermuda, but don't worry you won't feel a thing.

Dr. Robert Marshall, a research associate at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, will be speaking at the Bermuda College.

He is part of a group run by Stanford professor Dr. Umran Inan that studies Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio waves.

"When you turn on an AM radio you are listening to waves in the medium range, and we are two steps below that," said Dr. Marshall. "We study a phenomenon known as space weather.

"We study the effects of lightning and the earth's magnetosphere and the ionosphere."

The magnetosphere is the area of space, around the Earth, that is controlled by the Earth's magnetic field.

The ionosphere is the uppermost part of the Earth's atmosphere.

Dr. Marshall said there are two things that drive space weather, the sun, and the Earth's own magnetic field.

"Whenever a solar flare happens it spits out a ton of material from the sun, hydrogen, photons and electrons," said Dr. Marshall.

"It spits out a very hot gas. This gas travels through space and reaches the earth.

"Our planet is like a big magnet. When all this hot gas comes from the sun reaches the earth it interacts with the magnetic field surrounding the earth."

This phenomenon creates the aurora borealis in the Northern hemisphere and the aurora australis in the Southern hemisphere. These are known as the polar lights.

"Sometimes we get geomagnetic storms," Dr. Marshall said. "It means there is a lot of turbulence and activity in the magnetosphere."

"This turbulence can be a driver allowing large amounts of energy to be dumped into our atmosphere."

He said that a solar flare or magnetic storm doesn't really effect people directly, but it may affect our technology.

"When one of these storms occur it will push all of this hot gas down so that it can reach our atmosphere," he said. "Sometimes it can reach all the way down to the ground.

"Some of these large events have caused large brownouts and blackouts over a large region.

"There was a huge solar storm in the winter of 1989 which knocked out a lot of power grids in Montreal. They were out of power for a couple of days.

"These particles can also significantly affect satellites in space. A satellite can be destroyed during a solar flare."

A satellite called Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) positioned between the Earth and the Sun monitors these events.

"When it detects a big event it sends a message down to the ground and tells us there is a big event coming," said Dr. Marshall. "There is some advance warning, but I'm not sure how much."

Dr. Marshall is coming to Bermuda, because the island is actually part of a large experiment.

"We are trying to see if we can use the radio waves created on the ground to remove some of these hot particles in the magnetosphere," he said.

"So we are doing an experiment that involves an American Navy transmitter located in Maine. It sends radio waves up into space.

"The goal is that the radio waves will interact with these hot particles and they will come crashing down into the atmosphere."

But he said these particles would hit at an altitude of 100 kilometres above the earth— way above airplanes or anything Earthlings have to worry about.

"Using a different type of radio wave, and using low light sensitive cameras we can detect these particles crashing into the atmosphere," he said.

But in order to do this, they needed a way of detecting the particles.

"Right over Bermuda is where a lot of this is expected to come down," he said.

When asked why they didn't bring these particles down on California, he said they would have, but they didn't have the American Navy transmitter there, normally used for communicating with submarines.

He said the transmitters are completely harmless to humans.

" On the scale of human activity it is so insignificant to be worth anyone's time," he said.

The science team is trying to produce an aurora similar to the one seen over Alaska regularly.

"We are producing an aurora but on a much weaker scale," he said, "so you would never see it."

Dr. Marshall has helped to set up monitoring antennas on all seven continents. One of these receiver antennas sits on top of a building at the Bermuda College

"We have probably close to a hundred of these receivers around the world," he said. "It has got to the point we are almost mass producing them and we set them up in two days.

"There is a small antenna that has to be mounted on the roof or somewhere. A cable runs into a building to a regular computer."

"There are a few variations on the antenna," he said. "The smallest one is four feet tall and eight feet across, and the largest is about 33 feet tall."

The antennas help to monitor small radio fluctuations.

Dr. Marshall said the experiments had already started, but he was unaware of any results.

The ultimate goal is to be able to remove these hot particles from space so that they won't disrupt communication systems on the ground.

Dr. Marshall started out studying electrical engineering and optics at Sanford.

"My advisor, Dr. Inan, was very convincing that this area was an interesting and exciting topic. Even though I was in electrical engineering I was more interested in the physics side of things."

Dr. Marshall will be speaking on Wednesday at the Bermuda College from 6.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. in the North Hall Lecture Theatre.